Translation in Cascading Crises

Federico Federici, Sharon O'Brien, Federico M. Federici, Sharon O'Brien, Federico Federici, Federico M. Federici, Sharon O'Brien

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781000672794
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This volume addresses the imperative need for recognizing, exploring, and developing the role of multilingual communication in crisis settings. It is recognized that 'communication is aid' and that access to communication is an undeniable human right in crises. Even where effective and accurate information is available to be distributed, circulated, and broadcast in different ways through an ever-growing array of technologies, too often the language barrier remains in place.

From the Philippines to Lebanon via Spain, Italy, Columbia, and the UK, crisis situations occur worldwide, with different cultural reactions and needs everywhere. The contributors of this volume represent a geographical mixture of regions, language combinations, and disciplines, because crisis situations need to be studied in their locale with different methods. Drawing on disaster studies research, this book aims to stimulate a broad, multidisciplinary debate on how complex communication is in cascading crises and on the role translation can play to facilitate communication.

Translation in Cascading Crises is a key resource for students and researchers of Translation and Interpreting Studies, Humanitarian Studies, and Disaster Studies.

1

Cascading crises

Translation as risk reduction

Federico M. Federici and Sharon O’Brien

1 Context

On 14 March 2019, Cyclone Idai made landfall near Beira, with winds at 170km/h and more, it was to cause havoc in Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and Malawi. The weather front had worsened around 6 March, and in the early days of the crisis there were reports of hundreds of victims, with over 500,000 displaced people (the whole population of Beira city). Over two weeks later, after Cyclone Idai had made landfall, the first cases of cholera and spikes of malaria were recorded; these first outbreaks were signalled by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC). International humanitarian organizations tried to access the people in need, managing only in some regions as the areas most affected by the cyclone were inaccessible for weeks. The scarcity of helicopters, these being the only suitable vehicles to reach the areas, delayed the response efforts. Drinking water resources dwindled immediately; hygiene and safe conditions were impossible to maintain. By Friday 22 March, the UN had released over $20 million in funds to support the humanitarian relief operations, but the scale of destruction was described as ‘unprecedented’ and ‘staggering’ (IFRC, 2019). Schools were destroyed, farms annihilated, families disappeared. In all its devastating force, this type of natural hazard is on the increase because of the human impact on climate, especially the increased strength of winds caused by global warming. Cyclone Ida is an example of a ‘cascading disaster’ (Pescaroli and Alexander, 2015). Pescaroli and Alexander define cascading effects in disasters as:

the dynamics present in disasters, in which the impact of a physical event or the development of an initial technological or human failure generates a sequence of events in human subsystems that result in physical, social or economic disruption. Thus, an initial impact can trigger other phenomena that lead to consequences with significant magnitudes.

(2015, pp. 64–65)

Their definition underpins this volume. And the cascading effects of Cyclone Ida are a dreadful illustration of the accuracy of this definition, as they will be felt by generations of residents. The March 2019 event immediately disrupted the lives of generations to come, but its consequences on socio-economic dimensions also go in unexpected directions: The number of people whose schooling plans were forced to change and the traumas and risks that will linger for decades will turn a single disaster into a cascading crisis. The difference between disaster and crisis is in the duration: Not only are crisis situations disruptive events that occur at a specific time, in a specific region, to identifiable groups of people, but crises also have cascading effects on surrounding societies and regions, immediately and over time. Crisis situations last longer and they can become semi-permanent states – as, for instance, with the lengthy recovery times after earthquakes in Italy, such as the 2009 L’Aquila earthquake, where after a whole decade only limited progress has been made in reconstructing the city and its social networks. We discuss relevant terminology further in Section 2.

Humanitarian organizations need information to act promptly and to exchange information and learn from affected communities about their needs and requirements. To this purpose, Translators without Borders have been publishing crisis language maps since 2016, as an aid for international responders to be at least aware of the linguistic diversity that they will face in a humanitarian crisis. Figure 1.1 shows the map produced by Translators without Borders on 17 March 2019. Intended to support responders involved in the humanitarian response to Cyclone Idai, this map gives a sense of the complexity of risk communication of health concerns among people living in the affected areas. The complexity of crisis communication between local and international responders, local institutions and international institutions, and the humanitarian sectors is evident. Communication between the responders and the affected population becomes an undeniable source of delays, confusion, and, at worst, could lead to additional property damage and loss, or deaths (Bastide, 2018).

Figure 1.1Crisis language map, Mozambique by Translators without Borders

Source: https://translatorswithoutborders.org/mozambique-cyclone-idai-crisis-language-map/

The heightened confusion, delays, and consequences of poor communication map directly onto the second part of the definition by Pescaroli and Alexander (2015, p. 65) that expands on the multidimensional, secondary, and intangible effects of disasters, which are seen as non-linear, hence themselves triggers of crises.

Cascading effects are complex and multi-dimensional and evolve constantly over time. They are associated more with the magnitude of vulnerability than with that of hazards. Low-level hazards can generate broad chain effects if vulnerabilities are widespread in the system or not addressed properly in sub-systems. For these reasons, it is possible to isolate the elements of the chain and see them as individual (subsystem) disasters in their own right. In particular, cascading effects can interact with the secondary or intangible effects of disasters.

This definition exemplifies how the study of communication in crisis settings has to be a cross-disciplinary endeavour through which the impact on all subsystems can be assessed to address some vulnerabilities. This book intends to stimulate a multidisciplinary debate on how communication is bound to be extremely complex in cascading crises and on the role that translation, understood broadly as both translating and interpreting, can play to facilitate communication. In this chapter, we bring together overarching issues that emerge from this field of study, which have in equal measure challenged and driven our research in Crisis Translation.¹

2 Cascading crises: Definition and translation as risk reduction

In crises where human-induced or natural hazards develop into major disasters that have significant impacts on society, the power of language becomes extremely significant. Just as Cyclone Ida affected a huge territory, it also affected cultures with their distinct beliefs, rituals, routines, and languages. The international humanitarian organizations faced a terrified population, and the members of the local NGOs and institutions were likely to be at the same time affected. One non-rhetorical question emerges: When they are traumatized, affected, involved, and exhausted by the struggle to respond to the many needs of so many different people, is it right to ask members of these communities to serve as interpreters and translators? Responders tend to look for local people to help with communication, if their organizations do not have local offices on the ground. Is it right to increase demands on their cognitive and financial loads, as well as on their human resources, at a time when they are dealing with extremely heightened emotional loads? Our contention, and that of the contributors to this volume, is that, although communicating across languages and cultures is complex and resource-demanding, it is advantageous to many stakeholders to think about, plan, and implement multilingual crisis communication.

Disaster risk reduction researchers highlight culture-bound concepts for their power in framing crises (Krüger et al., 2015), however investigations of the depth, breadth, and duration of the impact that the language barrier has over communication in the different phases of cascading crises remain to be carried out. The multiple roles of those using language to enable communication and empower crisis-affected communities to be equally informed, independently of their native language, have remained for a long time vaguely defined and understudied. Coordination in relief and humanitarian operations depends on efficient and prompt communication, the lack of which is recognized as the most common obstacle to coordinating efforts and resources in responding to emergencies by the international community (Crowley and Chan, 2011). The main goal of emergency plans and operations is to contain the initial impact of the cascading crises on critical infrastructures. To mitigate the long-term cascading effects or, even better, to mitigate them by increasing communicative readiness prior to an event, we have been advocating that translation be considered as part of the planning process. Risk reduction should include serious thinking on policies for language support and ownership more than currently happens (Federici et al., 2019).

From this perspective, we explain our terminological stance: Crisis is preferred to ‘disaster’, since O’Brien’s original coinage of ‘crisis translation’ (2016). In light of Pescaroli and Alexander’s definition of cascading disasters, the term crisis allows us to look at the non-linear, multidimensional subsystems that are affected by poor communication over a long time. We use crisis as an all-encompassing term to include short- and long-term events and their effects, which may be triggered by a disaster. When evaluating the vast terminological debates on disaster and crises (see discussion in O’Brien and Federici, 2019), we engaged with Quarantelli’s landmark definitions (Quarantelli, 1978, 1987, 1998, 2005) up to the recent UNISDR’s definition in the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (2015). All definitions are characterized by considerations of duration, resources needed, geographical impact, consequences and effects, and so on. Such definitions seem to focus predominantly on what needs to be triggered depending on the typology of the disaster, and the protocols that must be activated to deal with them (UNISDR, 2015, 2016). Some are also preferences dictated by the varieties of English used by Anglophone communities of risk reduction researchers, whereby ‘crisis’ is preferred in European contexts over North-American and Australasian English-language publications in Disaster Studies. Other preferences demark disciplinary boundaries (e.g. crisis communication is a research field that subsumes communication in disaster contexts).

We prefer crisis because it embodies all temporal as well as societal dimensions that must be considered before and after a disruptive event happens, including preparedness, resilience, and long-term reconstruction. Enander (2018, p. 715) summarizes the literature in the field of crisis management, to capture how organizations must have adaptive features to deal with crises:

Organizations low on discipline but high on agility will tend to be reactive, applying ad hoc solutions as events unfold. Organizations low on agility but high on discipline will tend toward the bureaucratic and sticking to protocol, regardless of the situational demands.

The middle position of the ‘ideal organization’, she continues, is one that leads organizations to ‘acting in a balanced but adaptive manner’ (ibid.). The underlying principles of our research in crisis translation rest on an acute perception of the re-active mode of dealing with the language needs of crisis-affected communities as an obstacle to acting in a ‘balanced but adaptive manner’ that should no longer have the impact it continues to have.

Triggering one response protocol rather than another has social, economic, and organizational consequences after a crisis erupts. Different budgets can be released, different donors become involved, different response organizations enter or exit the context, and the event may remain a socio-economic crisis for decades (Alexander, 2014; Cornia et al., 2016). Complex communication requirements emerge from the initial response, as documents and records of meetings need to be translated (see also Al-Shehari in this volume). This complexity amplifies, depending on the size of the event, the processes that need to be activated, and the impact of the event on civil society. The question of scale of response is crucial from the point of view of communication; Alexander (2016b, p. 14) categorizes the scale of events that disrupt societies in an order of growing impact from incident, major incident, disaster, to catastrophe (see also Tierney, 2008). These disruptive events have cascading effects. By adopting the term crisis, we indicate the broader temporal dimensions of developing risk reduction strategies, the short-term recovery plans, and the long-term physical and social reconstruction that engender different communication needs, especially in multilingual societies. For this reason, we refer to cascading crises, in which a natural hazard generating a disaster is part of a broader, interconnected web of causes, and consequences of a long-lasting crisis. Alexander’s categorizations depict how a disaster is a catalyst to deploy resources. If resources are needed from outside the local area and the public become more involved, it is certain that the crisis will grow in size, impact, and duration for the local population but also, by extension, for those responders who come from outside the local communities. With its growth across boundaries, new communication needs soon emerge during the crisis, between local affected populations and the relief operations, or for the local vulnerable groups, such as culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities, for those parts of the world that continue to act on a vision of society as ‘monolingual’.

A crisis is determined by the aftermaths of the event as much as by the existing vulnerabilities of the society at the moment of disruption, hence social crises leading to conflicts and successive humanitarian disasters are affected by the challenges of crisis communication (e.g. Yemen 2014 onwards). Communication strategies become part of processes intended to increase readiness to deal with emergency situations, building resilience in societies (especially against expected natural or human hazards), so that responses are more effective, recovery begins in earnest, and reconstruction allows a gradual return to the ordinary workings of the affected population.

Large-scale international collaborations have brought to the fore the importance of multilingual communication in the 21st century, following the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami and the 2010 Haiti earthquake (Crowley and Chan, 2011). However, the focus was initially on interpreting as ‘a problem’ that delayed efficient communication strategies. From 2016 onward, additional focus on community engagement for disaster-affected regions raised awareness of the fact that translation and interpreting (T&I) are necessary and not just an unexpected problem. On translation of needs from the local communities to international humanitarian aid organizations rests successful activation of suitable protocols. In turn, protocol...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Cascading crises: Translation as risk reduction
• Part I Sample crisis settings
• Part II Instruments and support
• Part III Methods and data
• Index